The production floor of an industry is where all the work happens. Every other business activity is made to support the work that happens in the production floor. Raw and unprocessed articles are fed on to a floor, the work in the floor adds value and processes the inputs and a final product is ready to be used and sold.

For a place where a lot of important work happens, it is imperative that a lot of money is consumed by the floor’s operations and hence measuring the economics of the floor is important. However, not a lot of companies focus on this aspect, save Covacsis.

Covacsis’s proprietary tool, RTPD, measures the economies of the production floor of any industry. After a preliminary check on the various revenue leaks in a production floor, the RTPD then provides information about capital gained or lost due to various operations of the floor.

Post an INR 2.5 Cr investment from Blume Ventures, YourStory.in caught up with Tarun Mishra, co-founder of Covacsis, who shared with us the origins of Covacsis, current affairs, plans for the investment and future of Covacsis.

What is the reason behind making a tool that measures economies of a manufacturing floor? How is this different from other ERP’s that cater for the manufacturing industry?

RTPD is a result of a 14 month long research. After my first venture, I took time off for the research. Companies with large floors have no knowledge about the money being wasted over it. Information came in too late and you really can’t do anything with it. So the need was for a tool that can provide real time information about the economies of the production floor. Think about it this way, if I could tell a floor manager that he is losing X amount of money because of something as it happens, the economic impact that the information has is tremendous. That is the solution that Covacsis provides.

As far as other ERP’s are concerned, our product’s scope of operation starts and ends with the floor. I don’t think there are many others who provide this service.

So how has the journey been so far? What is the extent of adoption of RTPD?

After the research, I engaged with a thought leader on this idea and refined it before we took it into the market. People liked the idea. Our first client was a textile company and seeing the results they got from it, many more textile companies wanted the same and we literally had to stop this as we risked being type casted as a textile industry tool.

This was in 2009, and since then, we have about 14 clients across various sectors and all of these are billion dollar companies.

What are your plans for the recent investment?

We have three main plans for the investment.

Firstly we will engage with a channel partner for better reach to our potential customers.

Secondly, we are going to concentrate on enhancing the product. Seeing this as an untapped area, we will soon draw competition from the big boys in the industry. The only way to counter their marketing and financial muscle would be to make a really good product, for which we are looking to agressively hire experts across various disciplines such as Statistics, Operations, Sales and Technology, who can enhance our product through R and D.

Our third objective is for international expansion. We want to cater for more industries in more locations.

So by what you’re saying, Covacsis seems to be very dependant on its team. What is its composition in terms of responsibilities and numbers and what are your recruitment targets for the near future?

Abhijeet and I lead the team. Abhijeet, our tech guy, has worked in many top SME’s and was also my batchmate at IIT. The current team size is about 30 people and we are looking to make it 40 by the end of this year. This may not seem much but we’re looking for experts.

For large scale success of a company, it has to solve a problem. Anything that save an enterprise money is invaluable and Covacsis is working along those lines. Consumers are increasing by the day and so will production. These production activities will have inefficiencies and Covacsis’s RTPD is perfectly poised to solve this problem.

Raghu is an electronics engineer from Anna University who has a keen interest in mobility and consumer technology.He predominantly works on stories for tech entrepreneurs and startups. He is also an active member of the Bangalore Android User Group, a regular speaker at BarCamp Bangalore and is part of many other technology communities. You can follow him on Twitter @Raghum200